Tagged "2013-2"

Fresh, raw milk cow cheese, made in a similar fashion to Chevre (commonly known as Goat Cheese)

As a follow-up to the first post on raw milk (Buying Raw Milk in Tennessee), I thought it would be useful to provide a list of questions that we feel are prudent for consumers to ask prior to buying raw milk or participating in a herd share. These are questions that, in our opinion, customers should be asking their raw milk dairy farmers. (If additional quesitons come to mnind, I'd love it if you left them in the comments.)

Once upon a time we had only 4 chickens. One was our rooster, Elvis, and the other three were our laying hens, Sassy, Wynonna, and Freja. Freja, (the special green egg laying chicken - purchased especially for this quality) doesn't lay, so really, only two of our 4 chickens actually produce eggs. During the summer and fall, this was fine and we had all of the eggs we needed. Then winter came and, well, lets just say we were lucky to get 2 eggs a week! As Scrapple recounted last week, this egg shortage is no longer an issue and now, instead of rationing our eggs, we find ourselves with the fortunate challenge of trying to find various ways to use all 5 dozen a week up!

Since we milk seasonally (March/April through December/January), there are 2-3 months where we don't have any of our own milk. No milk for coffee, no milk for cheese, none for our cereal, etc. Of course, all of the milk we drink is raw, unpasteurized, unhomogenized milk, and we'd like to continue drinking raw milk even when our goats are not lactating.

A few weeks ago I posted about the end of the guinea mobile and how we were in the process of transitioning to an official egg mobile with laying chickens and all. A lot of people don't realize that there are specific chickens for laying eggs and specific ones for growing meat. When I say 'laying chickens' I'm talking about the egg layers. In our case, the breeds we have are Wyandottes, Rhode Island Reds, one Black Giant and one Leghorn/RIR cross. A neighbor of ours was looking to reduce his layer flock, so we adopted 11 of his egg laying chickens and 3 of his roosters.

I haven't written one of those boring Farm Flows posts in a while, so I thought I better get back on it.

Actually, we've received a bunch of questions about the economics of soapmaking and whether it can sustain a small farm, such as ours. We love that so many people email us questions about leaving the rat-race and starting a small business. It's inspring, and I hope that some of what we share on our site will help them achieve their dreams.